Jed Southgate - Jed Southgate

  by Dave Goodwin

published: 3 / 10 / 2013

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The opening edition of ‘Vinyl Stories’ saw us delve deep into the darker reaches of our editor John Clarkson's record boxes, and then last month it saw us take a glimpse into the vinyl stash of Hazel O'Connor. Over the last few months we have published a lot about the small, but excellent boutique festival Deerstock which takes place in the fine Nottinghamshire countryside. This month has us locked away with Jed Southgate, the organiser of the festival, in his 'Man Cave'. And what a beautiful 'Man Cave' it is. Apart from one wall which I am afraid we couldn't show you. Jed is an avid football fan, but having glanced at the posters and memorabilia adorned across that wall I beg to differ! This month's ‘Vinyl Stories’ explores Jed’s childhood and teenage years in the 1970s. Jed now lives with his family and works on the East side of Nottingham, not too far from the banks of the Trent. He runs his own company which sees him flitting around the country and wandering around stately homes. All of this would lead you, the reader, to think that Jed was a quiet soul. We nailed him down and found out the truth. "And then The Clash arrived and that was it!" I was brought up in Chelmsford in Essex. So, I was in amongst all the proper output for the punk era. But having said that around 1974 to 1976 I was into bands like the Stones, Yes, the Kinks and the Alex Harvey Band. That was my sort of stuff. And then the Clash arrived and that was it! That was the group that switched everything around for me. As we were in Chelmsford, we saw things like the 'White Riot Tour’, and we also had the Jam and Dr Feelgood playing in pubs in Southend, which was right on our doorstep. So, we had a lot of what was called pub rock – people like Ian Dury and all that - so I was pretty lucky being in that location, I suppose. When I was about nine or ten, I used to wander into my local record shop and stare at this record. It was a copy of the Rolling Stones' ‘You Better Move On EP’. I used to save all my pocket money up to buy EPs when I was shelf stacking in Tesco’s. They were the most treasured things when you couldn't afford to buy albums, proper four track or five track recordings. That Stones EP was from 1964, so I would have been about six at that time when it came out, but I bought it around 1970. That was the time when records five or six years old still hung up on the walls, and there was an old woman serving behind the counter. I bought the Stones’ ‘Got Live If You Want’ and ‘Five by Five’ EPs from there too. The thing about vinyl was that there was always so much to read. You could see and feel the cover and it was far more relevant. So, my obsession started there really. I used to come back from boarding school and listen to these treasures. We sometimes were able to listen to stuff there, but they had one record player in the common room and it was difficult to get on it. Obviously the Beatles were the biggest band in the 60s. A friend of mine bought me a copy of the Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ double EP, but I was never a great Beatles fan. I think he bought it for my 16th birthday. I've picked this out though because it serves as an epitome of what I've done. I have lived in bedsits, flats, all different places, and records like this have just followed me around and always been there. It amazes me how I've not lost the lot to be honest. And I haven't even got a player these days I was lucky. I went to a slightly progressive school, and they used to encourage us to go and listen to music. It was always music for me. I never really did very well at school. Traffic was the first band I saw live because school took me to that! One of my favourite EPs is ‘Live at the Marquee’ by Eddie and the Hot Rods, which was recorded and released in 1976. It has 'Gloria' and 'Satisfaction' as a medley! They are two of my favourite songs. Barrie Masters starts off saying, “Move all these chairs. You can't have chairs in the audience. Move them all! Get them out of here!” And then it goes into the guitar...da-na-na...and it goes straight into ‘Gloria’, which is just the ultimate rock track. I'd just left boarding school and was living in a bedsit in Chelmsford waiting to go to college. They were a local band to us, and when that came out I thought that that was so exciting. I bought my first ever Clash record from a bargain bin in Woolworths for 25p! In those days it was all about the cover and the picture sleeve. You had to have the picture sleeve! Me and my mate were as OCD as each other. I used to turn up on my moped, and say, “ Eh, look here! Look what I have got,” and we tried to out-do each other with the best cover. We didn’t have mobile phones in those days, and we just had house phones on the landing or in the hall, and I used to watch the telly and phone him up and go. “Did you just see that on the box?”, and he'd say, “Shit, yeah!” and we'd go to the shop and buy it! I have posters of all the 80's stuff I was into, but nothing from my earlier punk days for one reason. There simply wasn't anything like that at the time. We had picture sleeves, but that was it. You didn’t get programmes from gigs. Sometimes you didn't even get a ticket. You just turned up to pay on the door and if you didn't get in that was tough. I remember going to Wardour Street in London to watch a few bands, and we walked in and thought there was just some crappy old bands on, and it turned out to be the Sex Pistols! We didn't know because there were no posters or the like. Punk at that time was really, really small compared to mainstream music. The Clash broke through in America which was phenomenal really. Just to finish off I saw this band at Reading Festival, and I thought they were the Dogs. They were in fact called Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias. Their EP ‘Snuff Rock’ is my most played EP of all time, and a total piss take of punk. It has got the classic line in it which goes '”Living is a cliché/It’s all been done before/Death is the only thing we've got left to live for!” I saw it in a shop window afterwards, and I honestly thought it would never be as good as seeing it live. It’s just brilliant though! I was twenty, and still not grown up yet. I had really bad pleurisy at the time, and I thought I had to get away and go up north and try to get out of my terrible lifestyle before it destroyed me. So, I took an offer to move to Newark in Nottinghamshire, and they gave me £250 relocation allowance and put me in a hotel until I found a flat, so I stayed put in the hotel and tried to drag it out as long as possible! The problem was that the north to me was the strangest place on the planet. I had a broad southern accent. I used to ask for a pint of lager in a straight glass, and the locals used to look at me dead weirdly, but that's another story...

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